I just admitted to a close friend that I’m actually relishing what feels like a more wintry regime of greater simplicity: opting away from wine (or booze), keeping food at high quality yet low quantity, exercising and meditating daily…all of this leading to greater sleep quality, at long last.
Meditation – often at a natural 5.30am wake-up time – is often enhanced by brain-enhancing tracks from iAwake; my fave these days is “Deeply Theta”. On the exercise front, my 25-year tradition continues with a short, daily yoga series called The 5 Tibetans, followed by a headstand – the thrill of which might well arise from a great dopamine rush. Two local weekly Zumba classes were cancelled due to school holidays, although my yoga class was on so that’s always a plus. I got back into Nordic Walking in my own ‘hood, delighting in close-ups with nature as my photos here will attest. Thankfully I’m losing some weight too, 1 more kg to make it 3 — albeit more slowly than I’d wish. And at last my gut feels happier with the addition of 20ml of Aloe Vera to help with intestinal “transit”, as the French say.
At an online Q+A session for Bulletproof Human Potential Coaches with smart, scintillating Bulletproof founder, Dave Asprey last Tuesday, I asked if there were any updates or tweaks he could share about Bulletproof intermittent fasting for post-menopausal women who often struggle with it (and since my food programme uses some of the core principles albeit without much fat.) He acknowledged that older women often do better with 30g of collagen protein in morning Bulletproof coffee to reset leptin (a hormone that regulates appetite) even though it will break the fast. I’ll try that one too.
The professional challenge of the week came with a renewed request for weight-loss coaching from a former colleague and coaching client. She’s trying to lose 40 lbs (about 18 kg) and my focus was how my proposal could even be more motivating, i.e. tweaked with extra structure AND relevance to her since we’ve worked together before….in order to encourage greater commitment, compassion and self-care.
Let’s see how she responds. Sometimes people say they want to change, yet are daunted by the effort so they choose to stick with status quo. Stuck in hidden fears, they keep doing the same old thing…and keep getting the same old results. I’d like to be a catalyst for that kind of inner transformation.
